


hoarfrost witching hours

by evocates



Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2014-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-24 05:14:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2569457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/pseuds/evocates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Seasons have changed, and you have been looking for him for months. You find him now, when you’ve nearly given up on looking.</p><p>It’s just like him and you’re not even surprised."</p><p>Jiraiya/Orochimaru. Post-canon. (Used to be named 'Lingering Ghosts' until I found a better title.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	hoarfrost witching hours

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t written for this fandom since 2006, and I’m still catching up. My apologies if I get anything wrong.
> 
> Title stolen from Viggo Mortensen's spoken word piece, _Linger_.

Seasons have changed, and you have been looking for him for months. You find him now, when you’ve nearly given up on looking.

It’s just like him and you’re not even surprised.

He’s bent over a stone. You blink and the picture shifts. The grass beneath his feet turns into porcelain tiles, the sunlight into bright white fluorescent, and the stone turns into a corpse. How many times have you watched this? The skin is peeling off the faceless cadaver, parting underneath the stark-silver of the scalpel in his hand. He wipes away the blood welling up; traces his fingers over lines and grains of exposed muscle. The light bounces off the scalpel, skipping and skimming over the skin of his hand.

You can’t help it. You take a step closer. The image wavers, steadies, and you fixes your eyes on his wrist. His skin is paper-white, and you can see them – the arteries and veins, purple and green, slithering and pulsing beneath the thin, thin covering that protects his insides from the world. Your hand twitches at your side.

He is sickening and striking and those are the best-fitting words you have ever found for him. And, for a grand bonus, they alliterate. 

You can’t help yourself. He draws you in. He is a burning flame and you are a moth. He is a dancing shadow and you are a cat. He is molten gold and you a greedy merchant. You step forward and you brush your hand over the thick, heavy strands of his hair. As always, it swallows the light, so dark that it is less colour than emptiness, a black hole stretched into strands and set upon his head.

“Orochimaru.”

He hears you; you know he does. He lets out a sigh, tipping his head back. You press your chest against his back, flatten your hand over his throat. He’s not wearing the atrocity of a uniform he prefers recently, but instead a black kimono with silver and navy threads that catches the sunlight streaming through the trees. It blends in and stands out all at once, and you know him too well to know, immediately, that he has taken great care with this choice.

You try to not think about why. You do not touch his chest.

Instead, you lean down and brush your lips over the side of his neck, over the spot he uses for his Curse Seal whenever he decides to grant one of his followers one.

It is his favourite spot. You remember so many times when you have pushed him down – to a bed, a wall, a tree, a rock, blood-soaked ground, a corpse – and latched your teeth over it. He always reacts the same way, the way he’s reacting now: his back arching, golden eyes widening slightly.

“ _Jiraiya_.”

Your thumb strokes over the wet spot on his neck, scraping a nail down the skin, tracing the edges of the bite mark. It’s not enough. You haven’t marked him yet. But you don’t go further, because you have learned long ago that you can’t mark him, not really. He throws things away too quickly – his body, his heart, his very soul – and there’s nothing left for you to leave any sign of your presence.

Except, perhaps, in the way his hand is tangled around your collar. Except for the way his hand is slowly curling around your neck.

Your skin is cold and clammy. There’s water beading on your lashes that you cannot blink away. But your body isn’t bloated and the rot has yet to set in and the fish have not yet feasted. But your flesh hasn’t started to fall off piece by piece, so you count yourself lucky. You have always been the idealistic one.

He turns around in your arms, slings his hands behind your head. When he crushes your mouths together, you’re not surprised – a good thing, because you need to _concentrate_ on holding your form, or else he – idiotic bastard – will have to catch your lips as they fall off instead of kissing them.

His scent has changed over the years. He used to smell of dawn, of sunlight on dew, with the faintest hint of sharpness beneath, snake’s venom swallowed by the ground and soaked up by grass. Now he smells of the wood of his new body, of fresh, new-born leaves, and you muffle laughter against his lips at the irony.

But the sharpness there still remains. That, you think, might just be his true scent, the very essence of his soul.

When he pulls away, you cup his cheek, strokes your thumb over the bone. There used to be a scar here, a tiny little thing from when he had once received a punch that had shattered his cheekbone. The shards have torn out of his flesh, cutting through muscle and skin. 

Now, the skin is smooth. You try not to think about the implications.

“Jiraiya,” he says again, his voice hoarse.

“I’ve been looking for you, you stupid bastard,” you say. You smile at him the way you used to decades ago, before the bonds between you two started to fray. It’s a crooked thing, with exasperation and affection and dislike and disgust and a thousand other emotions hidden in the corners of your mouth and the sides of your eyes and the curve of your cheeks and your entire face is filled with that smile.

Once, you compared your feelings for each other to the moon: no matter how clear the skies are, there are always shadows, something hidden. There is only clarity on, perhaps, three days out of the whole year, and even then there might be storms and rains and clouds.

It has been storming for decades, but you think that now the skies are finally clearing.

You card your hand through his hair, long and thick and heavy. You lean in and bury your nose into it, inhaling his new wood-scent, letting it seep down your throat, engraving itself there because water has filled your lungs and it no longer has room for air. Thankfully, you no longer have to breathe.

“This is the last place I thought I’d find you,” you say.

“Where else would I be,” he drawls. And he gives you a look so long-lost, so long-familiar, that you laugh and has to kiss him again.

He’s sweet poison on your swollen tongue, and you have never tasted better.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

You tuck his hair back behind his ears. You cup his cheeks with both hands, and let them slide down, tracing the curves of his bones beneath the white skin. You feel his arms – warm and solid – and skim back upwards, from collarbone down to the gaping, open hole in his chest.

A part of you worries about the sincerity in the shine of his eyes, the one that makes them look like the purest molten gold, because he has no heart left, so how can he feel? But you laugh to yourself and dismiss the thought, because you found him here, standing in front of this quiet little shrine that your loud student has made for it, and that’s all the answer you need or will ever need.

(It’s not a good memorial, really. It doesn’t suit you or your student. But you don’t care about that, because you’ve never been the kind of person who chases after immortality. Hell, you’ve spent most of your life trying to fulfil a dream of a world that you have always known that you will never be able to live in.)

“I don’t know,” you say, giving him the smile you know he hates, the one that’s foolish and wide. “I told you that I’ve been looking for you.”

“You’ve been lingering here?”

You shrug. “I heard that you died, but Death told me you aren’t where you should be, so… I thought I’d look.”

There’s shock written in the minute widening of his eyes, and you can understand the reason why. You’ve hated him when you were alive. He had become a monster, a creature worse than the _Yamato no Orochi_ that he has been named after. He is the villain in the tale of your life, the villain of so many lives.

But you remember a young boy with a secret smile. You remember the way his hands look when they clean his parents’ graves. You remember the weight of his body in the countless times he had shoved you out of the way and saved your life. You remember the feel of his chakra whenever he heals you.

But you saw with your own eyes the way he had redeemed himself, the way he had fought and died against Madara, for the sake of a student who killed him, in defence of people who had always feared and vilified him.

And it makes you think if you could’ve tried harder. If it is your fault that he turned into a monster. If all the blood on his hands is on yours as well as his.

These aren’t new revelations, but you have always shied away from them when you were alive, drowning them in alcohol and women. But death brings clarity, as if life has been an endless night and dying brings dawn, as if life has been an endless winter and finally spring has come.

You’ll tell him all this one day.

Now you simply take his wrist. It feels as small and fragile as it always does in your hand, even though you know now full well just how much harm he can do with them.

“Jiraiya,” he says again, and you _know_ that he’s an idiot and overthinking everything again. So you just pull him into your arms and kisses him, tastes the insides of his mouth.

You don’t know how to do this, really. But you’ve always been good at making things up on the fly, and somehow, it comes instinctively to you.

So you find that connection within yourself, that spider’s thread that is wound tight around your soul and has been pulling at you ever since you found yourself standing underwater and staring at your own corpse. You nudge at it.

He pulls at you, trying to struggle out of your grasp. But you’ve always been stronger than him, and you hold on tight, refusing to let go. You have let him go once, and never again. Not when he’s here now.

“It’s not something you should be afraid of,” you laugh into his mouth. “And we’re late enough already.”

When the white light engulfs you, you think about Tsunade. You hope that you don’t see her soon; that she’ll live a long life and die an old woman. You hope that you will see the peaceful world that your loud, stupid student has built.

You hope that you have time in death to tell this man in your arms all that you can’t find the words for in life.

Hope fits you better in death than in life. You find yourself laughing again, your shoulders shaking.

You’ll tell him this too. If only so to see his face twist with incredulity in a way you haven’t witnessed in decades.

_End_


End file.
